Legal News

While BigLaw Lays Off, SmallLaw Reinvents

By Ashby Jones

Here at the Law Blog, we tend to focus many of our energies on BigLaw — the universe of law firms with hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyers. Generally speaking, those firms employ the most people, bill the highest rates, pull in the world’s most complicated legal work.

But it’s not always best to be big. Like in a serious recession, when work evaporates practically overnight. Big firms were, as readers of this blog know well, largely caught flat-footed by the downturn and reduced to taking dramatic measures to keep profits high, like cutting hundreds of associates.

At smaller firms, the situation wasn’t always nearly as dire, reported the LA Times over the weekend. Small law firms were much better positioned to weather the recession, largely because it was easier to switch gears and chase the work that did exist, like small-business bankruptcy work.

Writes the LAT:

Boutiques are flourishing in the current economic climate because they deal on a more personal level with the legal consumer and they tailor services to individual needs, legal analysts say. Smaller firms also have less overhead and can be more flexible and affordable, they said.

Clients are also understanding, the LAT writes, that “general interest” doesn’t always mean better. Law firm marketing consultant Stephen Fairley says that increasingly, attorneys are recognizing that “the path to riches is through niches.”

“The age of the generalist is dead. Our clients are requiring us to know more and more about less and less,” said Fairley, chief executive of the Rainmaker Institute in Phoenix. “Everyone wants to be treated by a specialist.”

And of course, SmallLaw has forever been known as a place which offers its lawyers a more humane balance between work life and home life.

“Over the years that balance was made virtually impossible unless you didn’t want to sleep,” said Laura Ferber, vice chair of the American Bar Assn. division that monitors trends among small firms.

“At a small firm, it’s a very dramatic difference,” she said. “For those of us who have children, a spouse, other interests, it makes it much more fulfilling to practice in this kind of environment.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 16, 2010 (boomark / email).